United States and Russia, the two great powers that sit at the UN Security Council take turns in paralyzing the Security Council
After days of talks in the Swiss city of Montreux, the Geneva II negotiations yielded no major results and on February 15, the UN-Arab League Special Envoy on Syria Lakhdar Brahimi apologized to the people of Syria for failing them. I don't know how Syrians took this apology but we know that they keep dying in their own land by the thousands and becoming refugees and internally displaced people by the millions. Brahimi's apology is just one more example of the paralysis of the international system.
This raises a number of questions about the role of global institutions. The United Nations, the largest inter-governmental body on earth has been ineffective on the most important issues of the world.
Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the largest inter-governmental body representing the Muslim world is no better when it comes to the most pressing issues in Islamic countries. European Union is more concerned about its internal affairs and indigenous Euro-sceptics than global problems or the recent crisis in Ukraine, which the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt calls 'Europe's Crisis in Ukraine'. ASEAN, NATO, African Union and other international bodies are far from having the perspective and the means to conduct good governance on a global level.
Americans have blocked the UNSC for years by vetoing every resolution that called for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Now, the Russians are doing the same to support the Syrian regime. This paralysis of the international system is not going to help the deepening crises in Somalia, Central African Republic, southern Sudan or Myanmar. The problem of governance, however, is not limited to the UN. Governability is a problem at the regional level as well, and it extends from Somalia, Central African Republic, Iraq and Lebanon to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and other countries around the world.
In some cases, the problem is the lack of strong government institutions that can provide security and implement the law. In some extreme cases, there are no state institutions at all. Take Libya as an example, Qaddafi ruled Libya like his own personal company. There was a façade of state but the reality was one-man rule. After Qaddafi's fall, the Libyans realized that they have no state and without state institutions they cannot establish rule of law, provide security or run the economy. Their own internal bickering has contributed to the current crisis but the absence of good governance has made the crisis worse.
Syria is in a bloody war and there is no functioning state except the killing squads of the Asad regime that commits state terrorism. Yemen is weakened by internal strife but also suffers from the lack of functional institutions that can ensure transition to national unity politics and democratization. Somalia has been a weak state since the 1970s and the current efforts to rebuild Somalia, spearheaded by Turkey and a handful of other countries, face the same problem of governance. Lebanon has a new government after two years of wandering but given the fragile nature of Lebanese politics, no one is sure how strong the Tammam Salam government will be. Israeli occupation has turned the idea of a Palestinian state into a mirage.
The Palestinian state institutions, to the extent they exist, work under severe limitations. The two-state solution envisaged by Netanyahu does not allow the Palestinians to have a state in the proper sense of the term. It is convenient to put the blame in an Orientalist fashion on societal factors but the problem does not lie with the social and cultural traditions of European, Middle Eastern or Asian societies.
Rather, it lies with the ways in which global systems of governance functions from the UNSC to regional alliances and individual countries. The old-fashioned struggles for power and proxy wars render the fundamental principles of justice, accountability and transparency largely meaningless and dysfunctional.
This is a real problem in a world of growing interdependence. The blame lies not with the people or their culture but with those that paralyze the system to save their short-term interests.
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Presidential spokesperson for the Republic of Turkey
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